Visual and Other Pleasures  (English, Paperback, Mulvey L.)

The essays republished in this new edition of Laura Mulvey's 1989 collection Visual and Other Pleasures  reflect the high optimism of the Women's Movement in the 1970s, its engagement with Hollywood melodrama, psychoanalytic theory and avant-garde film. In an extensive new introduction, Mulvey looks back at the origins of her groundbreaking article 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (originally published in Screen in 1975) and reflects on its historical and autobiographical contexts. She reassesses her 1975 theories in the light of her more recent work on the impact of new technologies, particularly the digital, on film spectatorship. This edition also includes a previously unpublished essay in which Mulvey discusses images and narratives of the 'young modern woman' of the 1920s, through examples of films made both in Hollywood and Europe, and looks at their relevance for feminist film theory.

About the Author
Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. She rose to prominence in the 1970s as an influential feminist film theorist and critic. Her most recent book is Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006).

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to Second Edition
• Introduction to First Edition

PART I: ICONOCLASM

• The Spectacle is Vulnerable: Miss World 1970
• Fears, Fantasies and the Male Unconscious or 'You Don't Know What is Happening, Do You Mr Jones?'
• Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

PART II: MELODRAMA

• Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' inspired by King Vidor's Duel In The Sun (1946)
• Notes on Sirk and Melodrama
• Fassbinder and Sirk
• Images of Women, Images of Sexuality: Some Films by J.L.Godard
• Melodrama Inside and Outside the Home

PART III: ON THE MARGINS

• Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti

PART IV: AVANT-GARDE

• Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde
• Dialogue with Spectatorship: Barbara Kruger and Victor Burgin
• 'Magnificent Obsession': An Introduction to the Work of Five Photographers
• Impending Time: Mary Kelly's Corpus

PART V: BOUNDARIES

• Changes: Thoughts on Myth, Narrative and Historical Experience
• The Oedipus Myth: Beyond the Riddles of the Sphinx
• The Young Modern Woman of the 1920s and Feminist Film Theory